Stephen Colbert, Racism and the Weaponized Hashtag

Last Wednesday, Stephen Colbert — in his persona as “Stephen Colbert,” the rock-ribbed right-wing pundit of his Comedy Central show “The Colbert Report” — aired a segment satirizing the decision by Dan Snyder, owner of the Washington Redskins, to set up a fig-leaf nonprofit foundation designed to “help address the challenges that plague the Native American community.” His newly launched Washington Redskins Original Americans Foundation has distributed winter coats and shoes to several tribes, purchased a backhoe for Nebraska’s Omaha Tribe and claims to have over forty other projects in process to help build a brighter future for Native Americans.

For a franchise reportedly worth $1.8 billion with operating profits of over $100 million annually, handing out shoes and buying a $100,000 backhoe is a cheap price to pay to defray ongoing negative PR from the many Native Americans who have been pushing for the team to change its 77-year-old name — which many people see as a corrosive ethnic slur and a reminder of a centuries-long history of broken promises and genocide.

Colbert stepped into the fray by declaring that, inspired by Snyder, he was launching the “Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals or Whatever,” a reference to a fatuously fake parody stereotype character, “Ching-Chong Ding-Dong,” that he’s adopted on air a few times to satirize knee-jerk mockery of Asian dialect (most recently in 2011, when Rush Limbaugh used a string of nonsense to mimic the speech of then-Chinese-president Hu Jintao).

When contacted, neither Comedy Central nor Colbert had any additional comment to offer on the segment.

This is when things got weird. And ugly. An unknown individual running “The Colbert Report’s” social media feed decided to tweet just the “punchline” of the segment, without any of its buildup or context, making it seem like a random racialized anti-Asian attack. The tweet prompted a social media outcry, initiated by Suey Park (of #NotYourAsianSidekick fame), and the hashtag #CancelColbert rapidly became a trending topic on Twitter — and remained there for over 24 hours, fueled not just by the original angry reactions by Park and other Asian Americans, but by a strange brew of vile personal attacks on Park by Twitter’s ever-lurking troll population, stunned responses from fans of Colbert wondering why the comedian was coming under such sudden and vitriolic attack — and more than a handful of plaintive tweets by Native American activists who’d just seen their own issue totally eclipsed by the high-volume collateral rage of Asian America’s fast-fingered keyboard brigades.

Portland, Oregon based writer and blogger of Navajo and Yankton Dakota descent Jacqueline Keeler pointed out that the explosion of attention given to #CancelColbert had meant that Natives had essentially been “edited out” of the conversation, with “one tweet supporting Native people for every 100 for #CancelColbert.” “Native people are messaging me that they feel their work has been co-opted,” she posted. “90,000 [people] go to stadiums EVERY SUNDAY in redface — how much hashtag trending would that equal in#CancelColbert terms? If our allies did that much twittering for us as they do for a satirical skit, redface would be banned from stadiums tomorrow.”

All of this illustrates both the power and the limitations of Twitter as a tool for social change — and, I think, marks the beginning of the end of Asian America’s fascination with hashtag activism.

Twitter may be the most powerful amplifier for individual voices that history has ever seen. Messages that resonate accrue retweets and co-signatories, a shout builds into a roar, and a roar into a revolution. The rippling power of Twitter has destroyed candidacies. It has toppled governments. It’s played a historic role in reshaping the political landscape of the Middle East. And for Asian Americans, as demonstrated by the #NotYourAsianSidekick phenomenon, it has offered a unique tool to bring widespread visibility to issues and ideas within our community that have long been ignored by the general public.

That’s because social media is, in many ways, our mainstream media. Our disproportionate representation on college campuses and in technological and professional fields; the post-immigrant comfort we have with long-distance relationships and distributed virtual communities; and yes, our lack of access to traditional modes of media like film and television — all of these have conspired to focus our attention and energies on emerging digital platforms. According to Social Media Today, Asian Americans are 36% more likely to be regular users of Facebook. Over half of online Asian Americans visit YouTube weekly, versus 30% of non-Hispanic whites. And nearly one in five Asian American internet users is an active user of Twitter.

So it was inevitable that Asian Americans would eventually flex our muscles on this most viral of social sharing services in a way that the rest of the nation would finally notice. The trending hashtag #NotYourAsianSidekick provided that moment — a burgeoning collection of angry voices sharing their frustrations with the lack of representation and respect given to Asian Americans in mainstream society and mainline feminism that spiraled its way onto the radar screens of shocked non-Asian editors and reporters, who never saw this upwelling of rage and resistance coming from a community they’d perceived as quiescent.

#NotYourAsianSidekick generated hundreds of news headlines and blogposts and enthusiastic responses — both positive and negative. It turned freelance writer and social activist Suey Park into an unexpected celebrity, hotly in demand as a speaker and an interview subject. And it established a kind of template for subsequent Twitter-based campaigns to follow, from a movement among academia’s most underpaid, overworked teaching professionals, #NotYourAdjunctSidekick, to #NotYourStockWoman, an initiative urging working women to share actual photographs of themselves in response to an effort by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg‘s Lean In organization to correct the ludicrously unreal or surreal images of female professionals seen in most stock photography.

The latter was promptly jumped on by Park and other #NotYourAsianSidekick voices as an example of “white colonialism” of their movement, and an attempt to “commodify” women of color. “Hey @LeanInOrg @sherylsandberg, please at least pay for the things you appropriate and steal,” tweeted Park. “CORPORATE FEMINISM THINKS IT CAN OWN AND STEAL EVERYTHING. #NOTYOURSTOCKWOMAN.” But this is perhaps a pointer to the biggest problem with the kind of reactive firestorms that hashtag activism has enabled. Though Park’s tweets and those of others assumed that #NotYourStockWoman was an official social media initiative of the nonprofit Lean In organization and its partner Getty Images, in actuality it was a user-participation program proposed by WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show, when the latter interviewed LeanIn.org editor Jessica Bennett:

“Here’s how WNYC is getting in on the project: We’re inviting you to send in your own personal photo that you think represents updated, modern, real working womanhood. Take the photo, and then tag it #NotYourStockWoman on Instagram or Twitter. We’ll feature our favorites on the website, and maybe we can even convince Getty and Lean In to feature some of them as well.”

None of the photos were sent directly to Getty Images or Lean In; the way that image rights work would have made such user-submitted photographs impossible for Getty to use in any case. But among the thousands who followed Park’s initial tweets, the perception that Lean In and Getty were collaborating to generate profits off of freely contributed images from diverse women had already been frozen as reality.

Twitter’s greatest assets are also its most intransigent liabilities. Twitter’s 140-character format leaves almost no room for sourcing — so the slogan-as-fact is its default manifestation. Even when links to primary materials are included, they’re rarely read by those who choose to respond or retweet, because the default means of participating in a Twitter “conversation” is the clicking of a single button. Reflexive resharing advances Twitter’s desire to be as fluid and frictionless a social distribution medium as possible — but it is a huge liability for factchecking. Or critical thinking.

The Twitter medium also provides little room for nuance or accommodated compromise. Conversations — which only recently were given some kind of connective tissue on the platform, eliminating the interleaved chaos that was the prior version’s standard — are disjointed into brief soundbites without room for caveats, and the lack of threading means that people are often mistakenly retweeting out-of-context comments or angrily responding to the wrong people. As a tool for debate, it’s a terrible mess: Imagine trying to host a dialogue using nothing but bumper stickers and t-shirts — or, if you’re antiquarian enough to know the reference, Burma-Shave highway signs.

And as a mechanism for generating a groundswell of opinion, it’s as dangerous as it is potent. Twitter platform offer no markers to indicate why a hashtag is trending. Is something trending because it’s popular, or because it’s hated? Is it being fueled by fanboy enthusiasm, or the flames of a thousand trolls? It doesn’t really matter. The algorithm that determines what trends only cares that the tag is being repeated and repeated and repeated again, regardless of reason or source.

Which is what has brought us to a moment where a directive can go out — “trend this” — and ten thousand users will jump into the pool at once, causing a mighty enough splash to draw further attention from onlookers. Once something has been labeled as evil, exploitative or wrong, any attempts to provide counterpoint are defined as a symbol of “internalized racism/sexism/homophobia” or “tone policing” or “respectability politics” on the part of the critic. Voices without a multitude of retweeters behind them are often cowed or bullied into silence. Factual errors and sourcing mistakes are frequently swept under the rug. Sweeping rhetoric and grandiose statements — the better to draw attention by — become the primary stuff of dialogue. The lurking trolls of the Internet are magnetically drawn to these loud and colorful gestures and respond with disgusting, personal and often pornographic or violent rejoinders, which both further fuel the firestorm and provide a kind of validation for the campaign’s leadership: We must be hitting a nerve because the enemy is attacking us in force.

In short, we have arrived at the era of the weaponized hashtag — where loosely organized and barely controlled social mobs swarm institutions and individuals at a scale large enough so that the trending of the hashtag itself becomes news, often overwhelming discussion of the topic that originally spawned it. The example of #CancelColbert is instructive: The original incident occurred. The hashtag launched, and began trending. Stories broke in Buzzfeed, Gothamist and other online sources, and then in traditional media like USA Today. Huffington Post Live had Suey Park on as a guest, during which the host, Josh Zepps, was aggressively patronizing toward Park — and Park responded with equally vehemence, before launching #CancelZepps as an addendum to #CancelColbert. Park and a fellow Twitter organizer, Eunsong Kim, wrote an essay for Time.com, “We Want to #CancelColbert,” articulating the rationale behind the launching of the campaign (but not the specific demand to have “The Colbert Report” canceled; some participants in the hashtag have since clarified that they did not want the show off the air per se, but simply to generate as much heat as possible).

Meanwhile, references to the Washington Redskins and its owner Dan Snyder have essentially faded from view. There is not a single mention of either in Park and Kim’s Time.com piece, which is focused on the plague of racism among white liberals. Conservative firebrands like Michelle Malkin (famous for her outrageous book, “In Defense of Internment,” scurrilously asserting that the government’s World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans was warranted) seized the opportunity to publicly cosign the reframed narrative, without comment from the hashtag’s initiators.

Billionaire Republican Snyder couldn’t have asked for a better outcome — or paid for one.

The hashtag’s initiators surely didn’t want this as the outcome of their efforts. But an avalanche can’t be steered. And this is far from the first time that online backlash by Asian Americans to offensive events has had unintended consequences. Those episodes have mostly been due to the lucrative attention such campaigns have drawn to the original perpetrators. This is a different and more toxic chapter in the narrative: We’re now seeing savvy co-optation of Asian American online rage by those individuals that have the least interest in advancing Asian American causes.

This isn’t doesn’t alter Twitter’s usefulness as a tool for generating attention and aggregating momentum. It does underscore that Twitter works best when it points to larger, deeper and more sophisticated perspectives and conversations beyond the platform — on venues that allow for more than 140 characters worth of context and distinction. Those perspectives certainly existed in the torrent of inchoate rage around #CancelColbert, including strongly supportive posts like those by Jenn Fang’s on her blog Reappropriate and Brittney Cooper on Salon.com. These essays explored the differences between the way that tweets and full-length comedy sketches play, and call out the unfortunate nature of Colbert’s decision to use mockery of one group to highlight the mockery of another. They’re thoughtful and provocative; they have the potential to change minds and alter opinions, including mine — though I still feel that the #CancelColbert campaign was a dismaying distraction from the fight against the eight-decade-old horror that is the Redskins’ name, and a weird exercise in “me first” advocacy for Asian Americans, I’m more conscious of the issues that made this episode problematic.

But the limitations of Twitter as a stand-alone mechanism for advancing social change and disruptively progressive conversation have been laid bare. And as rapidly as it rose, the day of the triumphalist trending tag is seemingly coming to a close. Twitter is a force multiplier and a sample booster, but where Asian Americans are concerned, it seems clear that hashtag activism is clearly #NotYourAllinOneSolution.

About Speakeasy

Speakeasy is a blog covering media, entertainment, celebrity and the arts. The publication is produced by Barbara Chai and Jonathan Welsh with contributions from the Wall Street Journal staff and others. Write to us at speakeasy@wsj.com or follow us on Twitter at @WSJSpeakeasy or individually @barbarachai.